While the Overture (also styled Prelude) was extracted with minimal amendment, the music of the suites was in places reworked significantly, resulting in delightful sequences of miniature tone-pictures to rival the more familiar Pelleas and King Kristian II. Kamu’s approach is radically different to Järvi’s, the latter emphasising the pictorial in highly characterised, virtuoso performances while Kamu produces leaner, less volatile accounts, often deliberate in tempo. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the tempestuous Overture (reprised in Suite No 1’s Finale), where Kamu takes Sibelius at his word with the Largamente molto – Largo assai tempo, taking over seven minutes against Järvi’s 4'50". The difference in pace produces a very different type of storm, one of the mind, its contrived quality according with the magical, artificial storm conjured by Shakespeare – and Prospero.

The Järvi/Gothenburg performances are undeniably more exciting musically but Kamu and the Lahti orchestra are perhaps truer to the spirit of the original and more psychologically aware. This subtlety of interpretation recurs in The Bard and Tapiola, neither of which is as outwardly colouristic as Gibson’s (the second disc of Chandos’s tone-poem collection – Pohjola’s Daughter, Nightride and Sunrise, The Oceanides and Tapiola – remains one of the finest Sibelius CDs ever issued). Absent too is Segerstam’s exuberant sense of drama, not unlike Kajanus’s pioneering 1930s recording, nor Beecham’s. For Kamu, this is a drama of the imagination and one discerns dimly the forest god moving between the trees, just as Sibelius intended. With superb sound, this is strongly recommended.